LinuxWorld London 2006

It’s been nearly two weeks since LinuxWorld London. It all started at 6am on the 25th October, with myself and Michael taking the Event Box to London on the train through the rush hour. I think both of us have arms 2 inches longer now. It would be really great if the event box had wheels!

I think it was especially good for GNOME this year, as we had a mini “wall of love”, which people were able to stick up their likes and dislikes about the project. It was almost like an off-line bugzilla at some times… maybe that’s an idea for next time!

We also gave out plenty of Guadec leaflets, and collected details for people who were interested and wanted to be kept informed. I also managed to talk to a few people on other stands about various Guadec things they might like to get involved in. Many thanks to Andreas Nilsson for his work on the flyers, which looked very nice professionally printed.

I had also quickly done some mini app posters, briefly detailing some information about key applications in the GNOME desktop. These were very useful for pointing out some examples of software GNOME provides, as well as great for people to look at! I hope we can definitely make some more of these. We also had a supply of Ubuntu CDs magically appear on the stand, that we gave to people who wanted to try GNOME out.

I also got to speak to many people who were using gnome in various ways. LinuxWorld is very definitely the place to target SMEs and individual contractors. By the end of the expo I nearly had the sales script down to a tee. I’ll write it up at some point.

I was invited to the LinuxAwards because GNOME had been nominated in the reader awards for best project. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but Michael Meeks (very deservedly) won the Individual Contribution award 2006. I was a bit skeptical about the event when I first knew about it, but it was an interesting evening overall. Chatted with Michael Meeks and Jono Bacon about various things, including how things get done (or not as the case may be) in the Free Software sphere. Michael mentioned the amount of bureaucracy in GNOME was becoming a problem. He mentioned getting a cvs account for a colleague as an example. He told me that when the GNOME project started, it was much easier to get things (such as getting cvs accounts) done. I agree to him to a certain extent, but I think a some amount of bureaucracy is inevitable when a project gets as large as GNOME is. We just need to make sure all the gears are well oiled!

Many thanks to the everyone who came and helped out on the stand this year:

• Michael Wood
• Ross Golder
• Simon Elliott
• Karl Lattimer
• Aiden Delaney

Day 1: Karl, Michael and Ross (if you can spot who’s who)

Day 2: Simon and GNOME

Lastly, thanks to my collegues at OpenedHand who came along and who I press ganged into helping pack up the stand, and Pippa who helped me get the event box back home.

Emmanuele Bassi and Ross Burton enjoy the stand before I tell them they have to help pack it up

As Michael said in his own excellent write up, bring on GUADEC 2007!